Piping Industry Progress and Education Trust Fund (PIPE)

The Client: The Piping Industry Progress and Education Trust Fund, (P.I.P.E.) Labor Management Cooperation Committee is an industry leading consortium, founded in 1980 as a 3 way partnership between Labor, Management, and the customer. P.I.P.E. operates as the joint Labor and Management cooperation and trust fund for the unionized Plumbing, Piping, and HVACR industries in Southern California.

The Challenge: P.I.P.E.’s constituent vendors were operating in a highly saturated service market in Southern California, targeting residential and commercial clientele with plumbing, mechanical, piping, and HVACR services. The organization was looking for a way to differentiate their constituent vendors, and provide a digital marketing platform and strategy that would act as a promotional vehicle establishing a foothold in the online marketing space for P.I.P.E. member vendors. The immediate business goal was lead generation, but P.I.P.E. wanted to simultaneously create an automated, fair, and equitable distribution and lead management platform in the process.

The Solution: CPI studied P.I.P.E.’s industry, and the immediate geographical marketplace that its constituent vendors were serving, in order to gain a holistic perspective on the business environment, to help develop and execute a digital strategy that would result in the highest rate of return. CPI also wanted to create a marketing pitch that would help consumers realize the competitive differentiation of P.I.P.E. vendors, and realize the added value of unionized, trained and certified service professionals. To achieve these goals, CPI executed a digital strategy that included multiple micro-sites, which established a consumer focused online presence to generate leads and increase revenue, effectively differentiating the constituent firms in a highly saturated marketing environment.

The Results: Since implementing the digital strategy execution, P.I.P.E’s constituent vendors have seen a steady increase in online lead generation over time. Using a platform that distributes the leads in an equitable and fair way, CPI helped P.I.P.E. solve the pressing issues facing an organization that needed to simultaneously generate and distribute leads among member organizations who were in essence, competitors. The analytics provided to P.I.P.E. for the lead generation execution also allows management unprecedented insight into the marketing strategies, service sectors, and tangential metrics that are critical for their business. Understanding how, and more importantly, why, consumers choose the service vendors that they do in any given geographical area in Southern California has given P.I.P.E. the thought leadership they need to usher their vendors into the digital age.

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Founded in 1994 in Irvine, CA, CPI has enjoyed 20 years of success, and continues to grow and refine its core offerings to best serve its clients and partners. CPI is proud to serve both local and regional SMB enterprises, as well as wholly-owned subsidiaries of Private Equity firms and the Fortune 500.